Laila and Majnu.

Long before Romeo and Juliet, there was Laila and Majnu, the ultimate star-crossed lovers who generations of Middle Eastern, Asian, and African cultures celebrated through poetry, plays, art, and later film. 

The original story is based on a real event, about a Bedouin shepherd named Qays (or Qais) ibn al-Mulawwah back in the 7^th century. Qays fell in love with Laila (or Layla) bint Mahdi ibn Sa’d, a young girl from his tribe, and wrote many poems about his undying love for her. However, when Qays asked Laila’s father for her hand in marriage, he was refused, and soon, Laila was married off to another man and moved away. Qays became devastated and left home to wander the wilderness and deserts where he continued to compose poetry but quickly descended into madness. He thus earned the nickname Majnun or Majnu, meaning mad or crazy.

Qays’s poetry and the Arab stories about him and his love were already popular and well known in the region during those times and were told and retold many times over the centuries until the great Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi wrote what became the masterpiece version. Ganjavi, who coincidentally first wrote a famous epic poem about Farhad and Shireen, the star-crossed lovers Heidi wrote about on Monday, researched both secular and mystical sources about Laila and Majnun and used techniques from the Persian tradition of poetry to make the tragic love story more vivid, boosting its popularity immensely.

After Ganjavi’s version came out – three centuries before Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet – the story of Laila and Majnun spread like wildfire through Azerbaijan, Turkey, and eventually to India, where it’s still considered the penultimate story of star-crossed lovers.